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A Visit To
Oldworld
Mom was at the port when the shuttle landed,
although I didn't recognize her, the last few directives from my sister having
gone to a hotel on Guapo I no longer patronized. I had heard about Mom’s
move to Oldworld, then headed out on a prospecting binge that's another story,
then got out of detox to find the ever-compassionate Moira had picked up my
medical tab on condition I put in two days with our mother. I’ve always thought
a sot like myself warms the maternal cockles more in absence, and Mom’s never
said any different, but the detox tab was paid, so there I stood in the port,
looking at the big wall chronometer. Forty-six point three hours till my
transport out.
A voice I remembered only too well
screeched "Seamus!" The grip around my waist from the grey wool
bag of wrinkles who made the noise was firm, but her arms felt brittle.
Later she showed me an ID card that listed the age of her current body as
seventy-five.
"Mom, you look-- how do you like it
here?"
"Fine. Yeah, that's the official In
door," she added because I was looking around at the shuttleport sign, at
something, at anything but her and her oldness.
"The name--" I said.
"The name? Fifth-System Planet for
Voluntary Mortals."
Not "Voluntary Immortals" as
I’d mistaken it, thinking it must be some euphemism from the old days, when the
only way to immortality was death.
"Too stodgy for you? We call ourselves the
Piddy Biddies."
For PDBTs, Persons Declining Body Transfer. I
gave the weird snort that means a laugh in our family.
She walked off toward a lift. "This place
is a cladded moon, you know. Has a six-day rotation, one sunrise and
sunset a week. It was atmosphered in eighty-eight in the colonization
boom, and dropped in the government's lap when the market went bust in aught
five. It's fairly well kept up. They've got some parks.” With
her safely chatting, I almost relaxed in the lift, but then she fixed me with
her piercing glare of displeased inquisition. “How long till you're due
for a transfer?” she asked.
"Five years. My clone's in the vat."
"And that one’ll be--"
"Twenty," I filled in.
"You always transfer into your new body so
late. Do it at fifteen, you're allowed to. World needs youth,"
she said, tapping a button hard.
"No thanks. I went through adolescence
once." Binges are all I recall of it, really, but the sober
intervals were likely not fun.
"That was ages ago,” she said, waving a
hand. “You wear these bodies of yours to rags. Look like a shuttle
case. Back and forth, back and forth. Like my neighbor Aggie.
Gets up to about seventy, gets scared and decides to transfer to a new
body. A few months later, he changes his mind and signs onto this world
again."
"But seventy is--"
"Way past the age when errors start
compounding. I know. He looks worse every time. Find anything
on your last prospecting trip?"
"Not much." Empty moons and
solitude. Better than uranium.
We got out of the lift and went down a moldless
corridor to one of six clearly identical rooms. Bed, table, collapsible
chairs, window overlooking your basic rusted semi-lunar world, not cladded well
to begin with and losing scads of the breathable every year. I could see
neighbors out hiking around. Two pictures of Moira on the table, a third
of us both. Odds and ends of junk in a little vidcase. Travel docs from
the library. A chronometer. Forty-four hours to go.
"What do you want?" she asked me at last.
I’d thought of talking her out of this dying bit, mostly during
inebriations. Put a lung of of happy gas in and I’m Cicero. In New
Heb, before detox, I’d quite preached the lads at the bar. But Mom’s no
bar lad and I’ve seen her knock orators flat. "Just visiting,"
I said.
"Money? I haven't got much."
"I'm all right. Moira said you'd like to
see me."
"I'm leaving her my citizenship," Mom
said. Meaning the right to have a baby. Moira's had her maternity
clothes picked out for three body-lives now. "What am I going to
leave you?" she asked.
"The home vids?" I suggested.
"These ugly things..." as she spoke she was
dropping the film into a viewer. Her voice trailed off at a shot of the
four of us in the rubble of New Glasgow. How we got on that world or off
it, I'll never know. Dad was exposed there and died of rad poisoning in
New Stoke-on-Trent two years before they invented body transfer. That’s
when she knocked out the orator, as a matter of fact. Said your husband’s
gone to a better place, and the children can go as well. She hit him right in
the snout. "Those were terrible times," she said, looking at us
against a smog backdrop, sharing one canister of halfway clean air.
"That's over now," I said.
She took off her ring. "Here, see if this
will fit."
"Mom --"
"Your father gave it to me."
"I know that. But how soon do you expect to
-- to --"
"Die?" She put the ring back. I
shouldn't have brought it up. She said, "You must be hungry."
"Not particularly."
"Then let's go out."
Out on the rock, I saw that some of the lichen was
actually moss. It grew thick over flat sitting-stones, deep emerald, and among
the gorges where cold water gurgled into pools. I like a world with
water, it’s the one thing I miss on a prospecting moon. The rockmolds
here wove a tapestry of species in greens and blues and rust. "Nice
place," I said. "Any animals?"
"Nothing but us. And the roaches."
"Yes, the roaches." The intergalactic
joke. "We find them in old prospecting camps we haven't been to for
hundreds of years."
"Hooray for the roaches," she
whispered. They’re fond of heroism in oldworlds, pointless as it
seems.
Neighbors were toddling by.
"Requa!" she called. "Marilene! Don't miss the north
bed. The spore bodies in the fringe are near bursting."
"Oh, wonderful. On a sunset day, no
less," Marilene replied, and they quickened their pace, supporting each
other.
"Those two --" I began.
"They used to be dancers," Mom said.
"Very famous."
I stared after them. Marilene and Requa -- they
were dance vid megas. Those strong light bodies had leapt through more
than one of my sotted stupors on long transport runs. They stopped
halfway up the gentle incline to another lichen-ground, waved cheerily at my
mother and toiled on.
"Moira said you were unhappy about my coming
here," Mom said.
My stomach began to churn.
"Do you understand how it works?" she asked.
"They'll let you die."
"That's right. This body will be my
last. They'll give me drugs to relieve the pain if I need them --"
"I know. Moira sent me the forms."
"She said you marched off and joined some crazy
religion."
"It's not a religion," I said.
"They call them Black Holies."
"And I didn't join." How could Moira
have guessed how close I came? I didn't remember saying a word to her...
once while we sat around cold platters at a horrible New Year formality, piped
sentimental auds in the background with live unpleasantries in the foreground,
a Holie came ranting on the news break. Something about ultimate
art. Use the time dilation at the edge of a black hole to freeze at an
extremity of perfect love, of perfect prayer, to be beheld forever. The
music came back again and the family fight went on, but they must have seen how
my eyes were shining.
"Moira says you almost threw yourself down a
black hole," Mom told me.
I took a deep breath. "They don't throw
themselves down black holes. It's a concept, the time dilation
effect. The instant at the edge is thousands of years to the
beholder. Everything stops. It just...stops." I was
jabbering. I was going to say something I'd regret.
"That's absurd, Seamus, but it's you all
over. Trying to freeze time. That's why you drink too much."
"Mom, I don't want you to die!"
My voice echoed. Now for the regret. She’d
stand up, tell me not to be stupid and walk away as she had on New Glasgow, on
New Edinburgh, on New Aberdeen. That was always mother. Always
don’t be stupid, always walking away.
This time, she whispered. "I
know you don't, sweetheart. I'm sorry. But life is change. Change
is life. Not dying kills the world."
I gripped the bench so hard, the stone beneath the
moss drew blood. "Then kill the world. I hate this
world. I hate it."
"My poor boy." She put her arms around
me. "I can't just keep living. It's only here where death is that
people are alive. Here there's anticipation. We enjoy things.
We feel. Do you remember that? Feeling, real feeling, not
weariness." Her arms were around me for the first time in more
body lives than I could remember. The Oldworld sunset tinged the sky a
subtle pink that deepened to rose and the black of a four-day night so
beautifully I didn't care if I never saw another.
"Some day you'll come here to live. I mean
it, Seamus," she murmured. "Then you'll be really alive. This
is a world of joy!"
Sara Greenwald's stories have been published in Pindeldyboz,
Comet, Moondance, Thirteenth Moon, , Stories, Bread and Roses, and Janus Magazines.
One of her stories was nominated for publication in the HBJ Best New American Voices anthology
and another received an honorable mention in the 2000 New Millennium Writing Awards.
A novel was nominated for the Bellwether Prize 2004. Sara holds an MA in English Lit. from Columbia
and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco
who kindly awarded me a merit scholarship.
Novel Web Site
E-mail Sara Greenwald
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